Man Cleared by DNA Tests Led Police to Murder Suspect

By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Published: August 6, 2000

An investigator credited DNA science yesterday with helping the police make an arrest in the strangulation murders of six women in Brooklyn. Not only did it ultimately link a homeless man to the crimes, he said, but it also cleared another homeless man in the case -- a man who then began cooperating with a detective and helped find the murder suspect.

More than a week ago, the homeless man who was cleared by DNA tests led detectives from the Brooklyn North homicide task force to focus on a 5-foot-3-inch, 130-pound panhandler, Vincent Johnson, 31, the investigator said. And after tests on a sample of Mr. Johnson's DNA came back with a match Thursday night, the other man also helped the police track down the suspect, spotting him Friday on a Brooklyn street wearing a bright orange shirt and heading for the Williamsburg Bridge.

The man called the police and followed Mr. Johnson until officers arrived and arrested Mr. Johnson on the Manhattan side of the bridge about 6:45 p.m., officials said.

Yesterday afternoon, the police charged Mr. Johnson with four counts of first-degree murder in four of the killings in Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The police said Mr. Johnson, a drug abuser who sometimes spent time at the Glenwood hotel on Broadway in Williamsburg, stalked and strangled the six women, leaving their bound bodies where he had killed them.

Mr. Johnson was charged under the so-called serial killer statute, a section of state law that provides for a maximum of the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole if a defendant is convicted of killing two or more people in separate crimes over 24 months. He was charged in the four cases to which he was linked through DNA evidence. Officials said detectives would continue to develop evidence in an effort to bring charges in the other two cases, and would also try to determine whether Mr. Johnson had been involved in any other killings.

''At present, Brooklyn North homicide detectives are consulting with other homicide squads to determine if Mr. Johnson is responsible for any other homicides,'' Deputy Chief Joseph Cuneen said at a news conference to announce the charges.

News of Mr. Johnson's arrest brought a wave of relief yesterday to the section of northern Brooklyn where the killings occurred -- a section that had has seen considerable improvement in recent years but whose residents had grown more fearful since October, when a possible connection between the first four killings was first raised.

''It was not like he was going to kill 20 people without being caught,'' said Marrin Rodriguez of El Puente, a civic group in Williamsburg, who added that neighborhood leaders tried to calm fears after the slayings. ''But they were scared. After all, he was beating women, choking them.''

Two of the victims were found on rooftops in Williamsburg and one in a vacant lot there. Two others were found in apartments in Bedford-Stuyvesant and one in a utility room under the Brooklyn approach ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge, where Mr. Johnson had once lived on a cot. Most of the women had been arrested in the past on prostitution or drug charges, police officials said.

Mr. Johnson initially denied that he had had sex with any of the women, despite DNA evidence proving that he did with some, an investigator said. He later made statements implicating himself in the four killings he has been charged with, but then refused to make a videotaped statement and asked for a lawyer, a senior law enforcement official said.

The police came across the homeless man who helped them when detectives took DNA samples from him and about 30 other suspects, officials said. The samples failed to match the DNA that the killer had left behind, said one investigator familiar with the tests. Among those cleared was a man who the police had been told socialized with prostitutes in the area and had argued with one of them, an investigator said.

But after the test showed that he was not the killer, he ended up ''taking a liking'' to a detective working on the case, Steven Feely, and told him about another homeless man with whom he had smoked crack, a man who talked frequently about tying up women and having sex with them, the investigator said. ''He said, 'Why are you looking at me -- you should be looking at him,' '' another investigator said.

That homeless man said in an interview yesterday that he had known Mr. Johnson for about three months and frequently smoked crack with him. ''He'd point out girls all the time and say, 'I want that girl,' '' said the homeless man, who is 42 and asked that his name not be used. ''He'd gesture with his hands, and say how we could take them up the hill, tie the girls' arms behind their backs'' and have sex with them. ''He told me, 'You could leave if you don't want to do that.' ''

The man, who is from Brooklyn and recently served a prison term for a drug offense, said he once talked with Mr. Johnson about the large number of police officers near the area where one of the bodies was found in a vacant lot. He said Mr. Johnson told him that he had had sex with the woman who was later found dead there.

The police said that when they brought Mr. Johnson in for questioning last week, he refused to provide a DNA sample and said he had not known any of the slain women, the investigator said. But one of the detectives remembered that he had spat on the street outside. The detective had warned him, as they went into the station house, that he should not spit inside, and Mr. Johnson explained that he had tuberculosis.

The detectives were able to take a saliva sample from the place where Mr. Johnson had spat, and by Thursday night, the results showed that his DNA matched DNA found on four of the victims, officials said.

The police said Mr. Johnson used to hang around a methadone clinic on the Lower East Side where two of the dead women had sought treatment and at a single-room-occupancy hotel on West 92nd Street in Manhattan.

Of the six killings police believe were committed by Mr. Johnson, he was charged with the most recent case and the first three, which occurred last summer and fall. In the most recent killing, Patricia Sullivan, 48, was found June 22 strangled with her sneaker laces on a dirty mattress in a vacant lot on Marcy Avenue in Williamsburg.

The first three were Vivian Caraballo, 26, whose body was found on Aug. 26, 1999, in the elevator room on the roof of 237 South Second Street in Williamsburg, strangled with a piece of cloth; Joann Feliciano, 35, who was found strangled with sneaker laces and speaker wire on Sept. 16, 1999, on the roof of 171 South Fourth Street; and Rhonda Tucker, 21, whose body was discovered inside her apartment on Park Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Sept. 25, 1999, strangled with the drawstring from her pants.

A little more than a week after Ms. Tucker's slaying, the body of Katrina Niles, 34, was found in a Marcy Avenue apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, strangled with electrical cord and her throat slashed.

Four months later, firefighters responding to a rubbish fire in a large utility storage room underneath the Williamsburg Bridge approach ramp found the decomposed body of a woman whom police have tentatively identified as Laura G. Nusser, 43. They later learned that Mr. Johnson had once lived in the room on a cot and that she was last seen with him in the area. She had been strangled with an electrical cord.

Charges have yet to be brought in her case and in the killing of Ms. Niles.

Photos: Vincent Johnson, left, suspect in the killings of six Brooklyn women, being led out of the 90th Precinct station house yesterday. Mr. Johnson camped out with other homeless men under the Williamsburg Bridge, right. (William C. Lopez for The New York Times); (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times)(pg. 29)